Gary Taubes on Why We Get Fat (Transcript)

Gary Taubes is the author of many best selling books, including Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Following lecture is based on the latter. Here is the full transcript of the talk….

Introduction

I want to thank you for having me and Carol for setting this up. And let me just give you a little bit of background before I start. And you know why a journalist is here, talking about weight and why a journalist has anything to say about this.

And as Michael explained, my obsession over the years has been controversial science, good science and bad science, how easy it is to get the wrong answer in science, and how hard it is to do it right. And after I had finished this book on the scientific fiasco called Fusion, some of my friends in the physics community said to me, if you’re really interested in bad science, you should look at some other stuff and public health, that’s really terrible.

And so in the early ‘90s I moved into public health and I meandered around the field until the late ‘90s, I was writing about nutrition issues. I did a series of exposes for the journal Science in which I spent a year on an entire – twice I spent the year on an entire article first about the idea that salt causes high blood pressure. And then about dietary fat and heart disease and that led me to do a what was a relatively famous cover story for the New York Times Magazine called What If Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat, or What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie, and I got a large book advance from that.

And one of the things with a large book advance it gives you a lot of time to do the research. I spent four year — five years on the book, the advance lasted four.

When I talked to doctors and researchers about this, I say imagine if you took one of your reasonably smart post dos, who had a reasonably good understanding of science, and said look, we have this obesity epidemic, we have this diabetes epidemic. We think we understand this but the fact that obesity and diabetes have gone wild during our lifetime suggests that maybe we don’t. Could you just go back to the literature and see if we miss something, see if maybe there’s some other explanation that we just blamed on because we thought we understood and one of the common pitfalls in science is as soon as you think you understand something, you ignore all other possible hypotheses.

So that’s in effect what I did, and unfortunately I stumbled upon what I thought were some obvious mistakes it had been made over the past 60 years. And now as a journalist, I am in the position of trying to convince the medical research community and the scientists and the educators that they have to rethink what they’ve been doing. So that’s what I’m going to do tonight with you.

The gist of it is – well, let me – so I wrote this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. Five years of my life, it’s densely annotated. And after came out I got a lot of emails and letters from people saying that this book changed my life. Now would you please write one that my husband could read, or my father could read, or my children would read? I got letters from patients saying, would you write one that my doctors could read, and I got letters from doctors saying, would you write one that my patients could read. So and see how we’re…

So I wrote Why We Get Fat, which is kind of the airplane weaning version of Good Calories, Bad Calories. Instead of providing the history and the perspective and the background, it’s more of an argument and it’s based on this lecture. And I’m going to argue that what I say is true.

Obesity Epidemic

So as we know there’s an obesity epidemic out there. Obesity levels have increased dramatically. This is the epidemic here so and we know that just – as Mike said living in Santa Cruz County, you’ve got obesity and the obesity epidemic. It goes along with the diabetes epidemics. So diagnosis of type 2 diabetes have tripled since 1980 in the United States.

So the conventional wisdom, and I am just going to give you this in background. Obesity is associated with the whole cluster of metabolic diseases. And what we mean by associated means the fatter you’re the, the more obese you are, the greater your risk of getting these diseases. So they include type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, cancer, asthma, sleep apnea, neuro-degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease is one of them.

And actually just yesterday there was a report that came in the journal Pediatrics said, autism is associated with obesity, in maternal obesity and maternal type 2 diabetes. And the conventional wisdom is that as you get fatter, something about being fat, then increases maybe the inflammatory molecules that are released by your fat tissue, increases the risk of these diseases.

The subtext of what I’m going to argue is that whatever makes us fat also causes all these diseases. So it’s not whatever makes us fat causes heart disease, causes type 2 diabetes, causes cancer, causes Alzheimer’s and it’s kind of a radical position. But I want you to take it seriously. It leads, as I explain to you, why we get fat or hopefully sort of expand your beliefs about why we — open your mind a little bit about why we might get fat.